I'm slightly late, blame being busy this week, but I finally got round to watching the pilot of ITV's Jekyll And Hyde... And I hated it.
Well, hate is a strong word, let's say I was... very disappointed. I saw the trailer for the show months ago and got ridiculously excited, I'd read the book at A Level and really enjoyed it, so a TV show should surely be great, right? The trailer looked good, lots of murder and dark themes, Jekyll and Hyde, what could go wrong?
Apparently, everything. The first mistake was putting the show on at 6pm on a Sunday, making it 'family viewing,' with such shows, writers can't go too scary, can't get too dark. The show has to be sanitised so children don't get traumatised, and there is nothing wrong with that. But when it's applied to concepts such as Jekyll and Hyde, it's a recipe for disaster. Half of the creepy nature, blood, guts and gore is immediately taken out so the entire show is family friendly, meaning some of the main themes of the story is watered down.
Now I usually don't mind that so much, I can handle watered down family friendly murder. But the writers of Jekyll and Hyde have missed the mark of watering down by a mile, instead making the show an incredibly cheap imitation of the original story, filled with cartoon violence (not one punch actually landed on a character, yet they still went flying every time) and very sanitised murder (I either missed the blood or it simply wasn't there). To say the least, it made the show laughable.
And if the lack of violence wasn't bad enough, the story line was somehow worse. Cliche doesn't begin to cover it (oh I ran into a girl, I'm instantly attracted to her, oh look she dropped her purse I must run after her) and the acting was horrendous. I couldn't take Jekyll seriously, or anybody else for that matter. Even Richard E Grant couldn't save the cast's bad acting. The only physical change in Jekyll when he switches to Hyde is an appearance of eyeliner and a few veins, despite the fact that you hear bones cracking. The shots of the original Hyde show a deformed man, I was expecting something like that, not just some eyeliner. Eyeliner doesn't make a man evil, it barely even makes a noticable change in face.
Even the idea of Jekyll being the decent of the original isn't that interesting. Wow, Jekyll or Hyde had descendants who inherited the curse, and this one doesn't know it until the lawyer tells him. How interesting. Totally intriguing. I'm hooked. NOT. The writers were clearly trying to put a spin on the original so it's not just another Jekyll and Hyde remake, but they missed the mark but a very, very long mile.
To be perfectly honest, the show could have been brilliant, writing a show about the descendant of Jekyll or Hyde, cursed with the same condition as the originals could be amazing, but the writers didn't quite get the right tone for it. And I think I know why.
It's back to the show timing again. Shows like this should not be put on during a Sunday afternoon, they should be on post the watershed, where the real story can come out, with no need to worry about scaring young children. Putting the show on during mid-afternoon is a terrible idea. To do a show like this right, post-watershed with a twisty plot line, with murder and mayhem is honestly the best way to go. Otherwise you have a show with all the right ideas, but it gets so watered down so it turns cliche and predictable, which is a real shame when it could be such a great show.
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